California’s forthcoming legalization of cannabis is projected to generate so much cash State Treasurer John Chiang is asking for a fleet of armored cars to pick it up and take it to Sacramento.

Chiang is not the only one infused with dreams of cannabis riches. In fact, an entirely new cannabis industry has sprung to life in anticipation of the riches to come.

All that anticipation leads us to ask…

Where is the money in the legalization of cannabis?

Will the money be in the cultivation of cannabis?

For decades, illicit cannabis has provided the economic food chain by which people living in California’s famed Emerald Triangle have survived. Will the money in legalization go to the small farmers in the Emerald Triangle, or will it go to industrial growers with thousands of acres growing under the sun of California’s great Central Valley?

Will the money be in the processing of cannabis into any of the hundreds of products from which benefit might be derived?

Since 1937, the processing of cannabis has been restricted to the concentration of the plant into hash and hash oil. But with legalization thousands of different products might be made. Will the money in cannabis legalization be in the manufacturing and distribution of those cannabis products?

Or will the money be in taxes?

Like many states, California has been spending beyond its means for decades, and has now accrued a mountain of unfunded liabilities. Consequently the state, and its counties and cities, will all tax the cannabis food chain to the maximum extent possible to. Will the money go to government, and if so, will that not make California’s governments the world’s largest drug syndicate?

In Part II of our California Green-Gold Rush series, we look at the money to be found in the pending legalization of cannabis; the obstacles to finding that money; and how that money, once found, might be managed.